The Making of Cultural Policy: A European Perspective



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system suffers from top-down behaviour, lobbying, rent seeking, political and bureaucratic favouritism,
and a bias towards prestige projects. The British system does not suffer too much from lobbying and rent
seeking, since it avoids the taste of politicians and bureaucrats to influence individual decisions. Both the
British and the Dutch system are transparent. The Dutch system allows more room for the government to
shape cultural policy without trying to influence artistic judgements, but suffers from political lobbying
and rent seeking. The Dutch government has made a determined effort to give more room for diversity
and innovation and equal chances for newcomers and establishment. It also has given a clear mission to
the Arts Council. In any system it is important to keep the cultural sector on the ball by ensuring a
competitive field with free entry. This requires equal access to cultural subsidies for everybody, but may
also be helped by vouchers, performance contracts and yard stick competition (benchmarking). It is
important to stimulate cultural entrepreneurship by defining ends and yardsticks to measure results while
allowing for the costs of targeting. The government should use the right sticks and carrots and avoid
destroying intrinsic artistic motivation of artists. Attention should be paid to how to manage cultural
institutions. Cultural governance is an issue, especially if supervisees of cultural organisations cherish the
chance to mingle with artists rather than do a proper job. Unfortunately, supervisees are often older white
men from the banking sector and big business. To be in touch with new and diverse audiences, one must
look for more representative boards of supervisees. In addition, the guidelines for corporate governance
can be adapted for the cultural sector and be applied.

Recent theories of delegation and control explain whether non-elected bureaucrats or art experts or
elected politicians should take responsibility for shaping cultural policy and allocating funds to cultural
organisations and activities. Hart, Schleifer and Vishny (1997) analyse whether public services such as
prisons should be delegated to private business or under control of politicians. Dewatripont and Tirole
(1999) discuss the use of advocates for policy makers. Dewatripont, Jewitt and Tirole (1999) are
concerned with career concerns rather than explicit contracts as a motivation of government agencies.
Maskin and Tirole (2001) study accountable agents with career concerns and non-accountable agents
with intrinsic motivations. Alesina and Tabellini (2004) build on these contributions to explain whether
tasks should be given to bureaucrats or politicians. They show that politicians are from a normative
perspective better suited to particular tasks than bureaucrats if: (1) differences in performances are due to
effort rather than to individual talent or technical ability; (2) preferences of the electorate and
parliamentarians are unstable and uncertain, so flexibility is valuable and the task or mission of
bureaucrats cannot be specified ex ante while politicians are accountable and can ex post be voted out of
office; (3) time inconsistency is unlikely to apply; (4) politicians cannot strategically distort policy
choices in favour of short-term objectives at the expense of long-term welfare; (5) the stakes of organised
interest groups are small and the legal system is poorly designed, so corruption is widespread; and (6)



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